Using 301 redirects can help improve your Search Engine rankings and consolidate your visitor statistics. It’s relatively easy to implement and will help preserve those search engine rankings for existing pages.
Why use a 301 redirect?
Let’s say you are looking to redesign an existing page on your website to take advantage of a new interest shown by a customer community. Renaming the web page with the new relevant keywords will, of course, help to improve it’s search engine rankings, however, in doing that you will lose all the existing search engine information on the old page you have just redesigned.
Using 301 redirects will preserve the existing search engine rankings and allow you to add onto it using your new design.
Consolidating your domains
If you use any type of web visitor stats software then you will know that all the information it gathers is relative to your main home URL domain. But are you sure everyone is using the same reference?
For example, some people may type in www.yourdomain.com or just simply yourdomain.com.
Your visitor stats software will likely see these URLs as two different websites and will gather independent information respectively. Not what you really want.
A 301 redirect from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com will solve this problem and allow your website to benefit from all the variations of URLs a visitor will type in.
Configuring a 301 Redirect
This will require editing a web server configuration in most cases so if you’re not confident of what you’re doing, please get a professional web designer to help you out.
Below you will find some 301 redirect configurations for popular web servers and services.
Apache (.htaccess) – Redirect Old Domain to New Domain
Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.
In addition to the redirect, I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.
Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.
Apache (.htaccess) – Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming into domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.
Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.
Apache (.htacces) – Redirect an old web page to the new web page
This useful if you are moving pages around as part of a restructuring effort for an SEO campaign but don’t want to lose all the stats for the old page.
Create or modify the .htaccess file. It should have the minimum lines at the top of the file
Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on
1. Place this code in your .htaccess file:
redirect 301 /oldfolder/oldpage.htm http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.html
2. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it,
skip a line, then add the above code.
3. Save and upload the .htaccess file to the root folder of your Apache server
4. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be immediately taken to the new
location.
Notes: Don’t add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also, ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:
redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)
/old/old.htm (the original folder path and filename)
http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and filename)
When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file.
The search engine spider doesn’t actually read the .htaccess file but recognizes the response from the server as valid.
ISS Redirect
In internet services manager, right-click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
Enter the redirection page
Check “The exact URL entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
Click on ‘Apply’
PHP Redirect
<?php Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" ); ?>
ASP Redirect
<%@ Language=VBScript %> <% Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/" %>
ASP .Net Redirect
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script>
JSP Redirect
<% response.setStatus(301); response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" ); response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" ); %>
CGI Perl Redirect
$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");
Ruby on Rails Redirect
def old_action headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently" redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/" end
